The Bank started the investigation and found that two of its officials - Gokulnath Shetty and Manoj Hanument Kharat - have facilitated such LoUs in the past.

The proposed suspension of passports of Modi and Choksi comes days after the PNB reported a fraud of Rs 11,400 crore committed by both with the help of employees of the Mumbai branch of the bank.

The CBI, according to reports, has requested the worldwide agency to issue a diffusion notice - that can be used to request the arrest or location of a person. "Without CBS input, there is no trail for audit, but even SWIFT transactions had to be inputted into the system manually which the bank failed to spot, and even the auditor did not throw it up in routine branch level audit", a banking source said.

PNB on Friday said it will honour its "bonafide commitments" and entire liability will be known after the investigation.

She also said that Congress has a direct link with the scam. He and one Kavita Mankikar were authorised to sign account opening forms on behalf of Modi's firms, the CBI said. Mehul Choski is being portrayed as the kingpin of all these frauds and the attention of investigators is now passing on to companies like Gitanjali Gems, Diamond R Us, Solar Exports, Stellar Diamonds and 150 shell companies. The agency is probing if bank funds were laundered and the proceeds used by the accused to create illegal assets.

Defence lawyers opposed the remand plea, contending that the arrested men were not the beneficiaries, and the real beneficiaries of the scam were somewhere else.

The arrest comes after the second case registered by the CBI against two PNB officials and others of the Gitanjali Gems group in relation to the fraud.

PNB last week lodged an FIR with CBI after it was stuck with fraudulent LoUs worth Rs280.7 crore, which were first issued on 16 January.

The FIR, filed on Thursday, says as many as 143 of the irregular instruments, worth Rs 4,887 crore, were issued to three companies owned by Mehul Choksi, the uncle of Nirav Modi.

More than half of the 293 alleged fraudulent instruments in the diamond banking scam were issued in 2017-18, an FIR registered by the CBI has revealed, striking at the root of the Narendra Modi government's drive to distance itself from the scandal.

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